Circle of Wagons: The Gospel of Madness (Book 4 of 6) (The Gospel of Madness - (A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Series))

by Georg Bruckmann

  Shepard

  Waiting drove me crazy. Sometime after wrapping myself in the blanket and freezing enough to finally use my brain, I came up with the idea of retreating to one of the greenhouses. Here it was at least a little warmer, and I was sheltered from the wind. It smelled pleasant, like fertile soil and somehow … well ... green. It smelled like a greenhouse.

  I didn't want this to be interpreted as an escape attempt, so I chose one that could be seen immediately from the door leading to the roof, stayed in the front area and wrapped myself a little tighter in the ceiling. Slowly it got a little better with the freezing temperatures. As soon as they would return, I would come out again and face this abstruse 'court'.

  Now that peace and quiet had returned to the roof and I was alone, I still could perceive the omnipresent, beehive-like humming. Quieter though, but when I exerted myself, I could hear a variety of life. Conversations, an argument, children laughing in contrast, and if it weren't so absurd, I would even claim to hear someone from somewhere softly strumming on a badly tuned guitar. I really had to be a little out of line.

  I was hoping Gustav would whatever they wanted him to do well. Maybe that would make these people a little milder. And Tommy - what about him? Somehow I had to succeed in making him understand that it was not I who was to blame for his father's death, but ultimately the degenerates. Right? Would his young brain be able to understand that? Had he even told them, the members of the High People, about it, or had he only shown his gunshot wound and claimed that I had tried to kill him?

  The uncertainty made me walk up and down the greenhouse, and it was hard for me to find a concrete approach and to even think halfway through a thought I had started to the end. Pictures from the tunnels and from the escape from the dog master's people, pictures from the fire station, not far from here where Tommy had shot me, pictures of him lying on the couch after I had treated the wound I had inflicted on him.

  Confused.

  Slowly it was getting dark around me. The door to the roof of the skyscraper opened three times, and each time I got hot with adrenaline, but each time it was just Mr. Paul. He stepped out a short distance on the roof, let his gaze wander and left again as soon as he had discovered me.

  Each time he made the gesture with his thumb again, while his free hand rested on the grip of the pistol in his waistband.

  At some point I stopped wracking my brains, and then they came.

  The door opened. Mr. Paul was the first to come out. When I noticed that there were more people behind him in the stairwell, I opened the door of the greenhouse, pulled the blanket tighter around me and faced them.

  Close behind my guard followed Mr. Mack and Mrs. Simon, then the one-legged woman and then at least ten more men and women. They hadn't masked their faces anymore. Here and there the clothes of some of them seemed familiar to me, and it was quite possible that among them were a few who had taken part in the hunt for us earlier in the day. Now, unlike this morning, I had a few seconds to take a closer look at them. Like Mack and Simon, they also apparently attached importance to a tidy appearance. However, they were still somewhat more suitably dressed than these two, which was probably due to the fact that they occasionally left the skyscraper. Three of them were younger than me, four about my age and the others about fifty.

  Where was Gustav?

  Where was Tommy?

  They all made rejecting, serious, sometimes downright disgusted faces, but well, that was not to be expected different. They were the hunters, morally superior, and I was the prey. The delinquent. That's how it turned out for them.

  Furthermore, I noticed that hardly any of them had firearms with them as far as I could see. Of course, why would they? We were on the roof of a very high building. I had nowhere to go.

  They formed a semicircle in front of the door and to me it seemed almost choreographed, how they did it, as if they had already done this constellation many times before. In the middle of the semicircle, Mr. Mack and Mrs. Simon stood side by side and covered the door to the stairwell from my sight.

  I had stopped in the door of the greenhouse, and now I tightened myself and took a step forward.

  The hand of the one-legged disappeared behind her back as soon as she had registered my movement, and then stayed there. So guns had been brought in after all. I would have liked to have stretched out my hands to the sides, but then I would have had to let go of the blanket, and I already froze anyway.

  So I just stopped and did nothing. Mr. Mack and Mrs. Simon were the ones who would make the decision here or at least strongly influence it, that was obvious. I tried to concentrate on them and to ignore the grim faces of all the others.

  I looked at them.

  The two had changed. Their clothes had already been impeccable when I first saw them, but now, probably for the trial, they had really dressed up. Mr. Mack wore a perfectly ironed suit in anthracite gray, a discreetly patterned scarf and over it a trench coat in old men's beige that was just as free of dust and creases. Mrs. Simon had squeezed her body into a pastel blue costume that stretched in front of her belly displaying her pregnancy. Their appearance contrasted in a bizarre way with the more functional appearance of their people, even if they tried hard tom come across as tidy. Despite all the absurdity of this picture, I had to admit, the two of them radiated a kind of official dignity, as they stood before me with their serious faces.

  It was then Mrs. Simon who took the floor first, without much introduction.

  Well, actually, she didn't take the floor. She waved me towards her. Her lips were pinched together as she watched me slowly come closer and pull something out of her handbag. At first I couldn't make sense of the flat rectangular object, but when the display lit up, I realized it was a tablet computer.

  When I had approached her to a distance of three steps, she instructed me in a bossy voice to stop and turned the small screen in my direction.

  "Defendant, do you know this person?"

  I had expected to see a picture of Tommy, but it was someone else whose blurred distorted picture I first recognized.

  Brownjacket and the vampire doctor. The woman was in the center of the photo, while the brown jacket passed her in the background and seemed to be carrying something I couldn't identify.

  "Yes, I know them both. We're not exactly friends."

  Mr. Mack stepped forward.

  "Thirty pieces of silver for the denier. We expected you to say that. Mrs. Simon, please, the other pictures."

  She wiped Brownjacket and the doctor away with a sideways movement of her fingers across the display. The next picture showed me driving the van. Wanda and Brownjacket were sitting next to me.

  Is that what she looked like?

  Emaciated, feverish.

  I did not look much better myself.

  I wanted to take a step closer so I could see more details, but I fought this emotion down. The picture must have been taken relatively early, because Brownjacket's face did not yet show any of the injuries and bruises I had inflicted on him later on, shortly before we reached the clinic that day.

  The picture showed us sitting together in a van. Nothing indicated the true circumstances of our being together. Nothing revealed to a neutral observer that Brownjacket had been our prisoner at that moment. Damn it. Damn it. The picture had been taken at an oblique lateral angle from which it could not be seen that Brownjacket was tied, or that he was threatened and held in check by us.

  Again she wiped the display. The new photo, and also the three that followed it, always showed the blonde doctor, in the company of some henchman, in the courtyard of the vampire building opposite the polyclinic, mostly next to the tank.

  "What do you say now, defendant?"

  I tried to think fast because I didn't want them to get the impression that I was making up a lie. How did the incomplete information these people had have to affect them? It was obvious. The vampires had in some way taken hold of the children of the High People, and I had been seen with
them. So they thought I was one of them. How did they take those pictures? It's clear they must have sneaked up on the vampire building at some point. Reconnaissance. Good, I could put up with that. After all, you want to know your neighbors, but the other pic ... I imagined that I would have seen a guy with a camera that day, even though I had been busy driving and cursing at Brownjacket.

  I didn't want to take any more time, I had to say something now.

  "I know these people, I've already said that. But I have nothing to do with their business, I ... "

  A murmur went through the spectators standing in a semicircle, and Mr. Mack and Mrs. Simon also unwillingly distorted their faces.

  "You'd better stop lying. That doesn't exactly improve your position, defendant."

  "You call me the defendant all the time. What am I being charged with? What am I supposed to have done? I was called a child murderer earlier. What exactly happened?"

  I asked that question even though I had a vague idea. I would be proven right.

  "Mrs. Simon? Would you please?"

  She called up a new picture. This time she held the tablet across as she stretched it out towards me. This image was terrible in its clinical, flashed clarity. It showed a room of about five by five meters. The room had been completely clad with white tiles. There was a shower in a corner, as well as two washbasins and a toilet with the lid up. Naked bodies lay on the floor tiles, densely scattered. Children's bodies, whose age I estimated between eight and twelve years. The eyes of every single child were closed, but they weren't asleep.

  Of course, that was immediately clear to me. I could tell from Mrs. Simon's face. A mask frozen in repressed pain. Of course they were dead.

  The longer I looked at the picture, the more details I noticed, although Mrs. Simon did not quite succeed in keeping the tablet still. The unnatural pallor of those dead children. Two feet of a man or a woman, which protruded into the room from the lower edge of the picture. The small, barely perceptible punctures in the naked arm bends. The strangest thing about the photo was that you expected a lot of blood, puddles drying slowly on the tiles - but there was none.

  Not a single drop.

  What then surprised me was that there was no medical device to be seen on the picture. No tubes, no infusion stands, nothing to collect the blood of the children and pump it into the poisoned bodies of the kidney patients. I sighed hard. This was not a new vampire camp, and the picture did not come from their old, now ruined headquarters opposite the polyclinic.

  That's what it looked like when they were passing through.

  "You don't look very shocked," Mr. Mack stated with blatantly hateful tone.

  "No. No, I'm not shocked. I know what these people do, but like I said, I'm not one of them. When was that? Are these your children? How did they get there? How did they kidnap them? Here, out of the house? I can hardly imagine that, the way you barricaded yourselves here..."

  From the second row, Mr. Paul barked in a rage-distorted voice:

  "He knows exactly what happened, he's lying, he's... "

  Mrs. Simon raised her arm and Mr. Paul fell silent, but the murmur of agreement from her people continued for a second.

  I turned to everyone now.

  "Listen, I've dealt with these people, but not like you think. The man in the brown jacket, the one I was photographed with, he was my prisoner, not my friend. These people kidnapped and killed members of my group when we were separated and later they attacked me and those who were still with me. We grabbed the one with the brown jacket and forced him to show us where they live. That's how this picture came into existence, and that's why you're keeping me here. I..."

  "Lie! He's lying with every word he says!"

  "No, I'm not lying. It's the truth!"

  "He's lying, the child murderer's lying!"

  "That's enough! No more yelling! This is a decent trial!"

  Mr. Mack was pulling back his trench coat that had slipped when he raised his arm. Mrs. Simon let the hand with which she had stretched the tablet towards me sink again. A light rain set in and I pulled the blanket tighter around me.

  "If this is going to be a decent trial, then..."

  Behind the semicircle of hostile faces, behind Mr. Mack and Mrs. Simon, the door to the stairwell slammed open and all the heads turned around.

  I was trying to see something. Again a babble of voices reached my ear, but this time it didn't sound aggressive, it sounded ... it sounded awed. First reverent, then pleased, then euphoric. And then the thin cry of a newborn was heard. The wall of human bodies that had hidden the events from my gaze opened and eventually I could see it. A young woman who looked too fresh to have just given birth stood there, holding the baby tightly but tenderly to her breast. Behind her, a red-handed Gustav leaned in the doorway.

  His smile annoyed me immensely.

  Great, you helped give birth. But I stand here before this absurd court and ...

  "It's a girl!" said the young woman.

  "Mr. Lehnert has made it! She did it!"

  Mr. Simon and Mr. Mack had turned around the moment the door had been opened. They approached the new arrivals with quick steps, which gave me time to notice that, on the one hand, Gustav was feverishly looking for eye contact, and, on the other hand, that the successful obstetrics he had probably done had not ensured that he was left unguarded. Behind him, halfway up the stairwell, stood two men who kept a close eye on him.

  He tried to wink at me optimistically, but I saw the effort in his face more than clearly. I couldn't say whether this effort was only due to his midwifery work or whether his body was already demanding the antidote to keep him alive at the moment.

  Mrs. Simon stood before the young woman and the newborn. I couldn't see exactly what she was doing with her hands, but I suppose she put them on the baby's forehead.

  "Blessed art thou. May your life be happy and full of meaning. May you also give new life one day. May you also do your part and experience the happiness of motherhood."

  Since I didn't know what to do make of this or what else to do, I winked back at Gustav. A few minutes and some more baby cries and expressions of joy later the excitement had subsided again and they focused on me again. Meanwhile the blanket I had slung myself into was completely soaked and I froze miserably.

  Mr. Mack turned to me. Part of the dislike for my person he had shown all this time seemed to have disappeared as he looked at me now. Then he turned away and put an arm on Mrs. Simon's shoulder. The two whispered to each other and looked over to me from time to time. I was too cold to try to understand the words. I just waited. After half a minute Mrs. Simon finally nodded and walked towards the stairwell door. She probably froze, too. Mr. Mack turned to his people, who were just as eagerly awaiting the outcome of the quiet dialogue as I was.

  "Today must be celebrated, not judged. We're breaking up the trial for the day. Bring the defendant a dry blanket and some food. We'll continue in the morning. Someone clean the doctor and bring him to my apartment."

  Soon I was alone again on the roof. The door had fallen back into the lock and I withdrew into the greenhouse and waited. And as I waited, I walked up and down, inhaling the organic, concentrated plant scent and trying to drive the cold out of my body.

  I still didn't quite get it. Not what had happened, but how the members of the High People behaved. It was obvious that they all attached great importance to their offspring. That was normal so far, but the fact that Mr. Simon wanted to carry a child, although she had already far exceeded the age at which one could reasonably safely survive these efforts these days, and the fact that they all seemed quite fanatical about the subject ... it seemed as if they were all determined to replace all the dead of the last decade on their own. Idiots.

  But that wasn't my problem. My problem was that they kept me trapped on a roof and wanted to do the trial for something I hadn't done. My problem was Gustav had a countdown on the antidote. My problem was that Tommy ... the picture of Wanda in the van a
ppeared again before my inner eye and faded at some point. This wasn't about Tommy.

  The door opened and Mr. Paul and two guards stepped out on the roof. His gaze palpated the surroundings and I understood that my wandering had taken me to the back of the greenhouse and that he could not see me. I became even colder when I noticed that he had neither a dry blanket nor anything to eat with him.

  Did he disobey Mr. Mack's orders?

  Did he want to execute his own sentence?

  All three were now armed. Mr. Paul gave signs to his two companions to swarm out. They forgot to close the stairwell door. Good, good, good.

  Should I try to sneak past them?

  And then what?

  Wrapped in a blanket fight me through the entire tower building?

  Bullshit, man.

  They made another mistake. They didn't stay together. My eyes fell on a tiny garden shovel that had been forgotten in one of the raised beds. Silently and carefully I pulled it out of the loose black earth. The top was rounded and did not look very dangerous. I wondered if I could use the edge to separate a jugular artery. Probably not, but if I held the thing to someone's throat from behind, I would at least make him believe that the cold metal on his skin would be a knife, wouldn't it?

  Sneaking up on one from behind, bluffing with a shovel, getting a gun like that.

  Yes.

  I could only see their figures blurred because the still falling rain covered the glass of the greenhouse with millions of tiny lenses that distorted the light and thus my perception in just as many ways.

  While Mr. Paul himself was about to approach the door of my greenhouse, one of the guards was walking along the edge of the roof on the right. I couldn't see the other one right now. It must have disappeared behind some of the other greenhouses. I ducked and sneaked along behind the raised beds. I saw in front of my inner eye how that stupid motherfucker opened the door and came in. That was the moment I wanted to strike. Just when he'd move his dumb ox head back and forth stupidly. My fist cramped around the handle of the small shovel, and adrenaline and suppressed rage made the ankles pop out white. With my left hand, I had held the ceiling together. Now I let it go. It didn't slide down on me, but lay on my shoulders. I knew I'd be naked if I jumped up and attacked, but I didn't care. Better than bowing to this pseudo-court or Paul's vigilante justice.